


trust your feelings

by Kes



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Family Feels, Force Ghost Anakin Skywalker, Force Ghosts, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-05
Updated: 2018-01-05
Packaged: 2019-02-28 16:43:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 990
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13275615
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kes/pseuds/Kes
Summary: A version of the scene with the tree in the Last Jedi, but with Anakin instead of Yoda. Spoilers for the Last Jedi.





	trust your feelings

The sky cracked as the Millenium Falcon left the atmosphere, as the storm swept in across the sea, as every step Luke took on the stairs burned. How many young idealists had to be sacrificed on the altar of a dead Order? Rey was gone, and the howling void he had felt within Ben Solo would be stronger now. It would claim her. His very existence had compromised the quiet annihilation he had planned for this poisoned well, a beacon that shone out across stars in a way that even he could not control, and Luke’s knuckles turned white on the firecell in the pale pre-dawn light.

Above him stood the tree. Its shape had been an icon of hope, of light, of child kidnappings and small-mindedness and clone armies and general failure, and if it could not be forgotten at least it could be uprooted. The next fresh-faced moth drawn to the Jedi flame would find nothing here. Nothing. No-one. No texts, no tree.

Luke raised the firecell, its orange light reflecting dully off the pale wood.

If the Force cried out, he couldn’t feel it. A drop of rain streaked the wood dark. The sea did not roar, nor the sky crack. Slowly, he lowered the firecell and let it flicker into darkness. His bones had never felt heavier, as he began to plod back down the stairs, and nor had his failures.

There was a figure sitting awkwardly on a rock overlooking the sea.

“Why did you stop?” Anakin Skywalker said. He didn’t look as Luke had last seen him, either in life or in the Force; he was an older version of the young man who had appeared on Endor, a less wrecked version of the man who died aboard the Death Star.

Luke was older than he had ever been. “Father?” For a moment they stared at each other as light grew amidst the stormclouds. Anakin rose, his posture and movements still unmistakeably those of Darth Vader.

This time, his voice was gentler. “Why did you stop?”

All these years, and the ghosts had never come to him. It had been a relief. How did you explain, to men whose response to their failures had been to double down, what it was to choose to wreak no more havoc on the galaxy? And yet, here was the only man that could possibly understand, the only one of the lot of them that had turned his back on his mistakes, and Luke had no words for him.

No words, but there were feelings enough. “You have stopped trusting yourself,” Anakin said, and frowned. There were three steps between them, but they felt like an ocean and even now Luke could feel the Force was watching them.

“What if I was wrong,” Luke began and had to pause before he could go on. He suddenly, absurdly, thought of being eleven years old and a little too clumsily enthusiastic with a screwdriver. Aunt Beru just gave him more junk to play with and told Uncle Owen he had to learn some way. “When I told Rey the light would not die with the Jedi? What right do I have to make that gamble?”

Anger. The Force shivered and Luke shivered with it. Anakin climbed the three steps between them. “The only thing worth saving of the Jedi was you, my son.”

“I failed.” If he had to explain what had happened to Ben Solo now...

His father shrugged. “You had faith enough in me, despite my... failings. Or did you forget that where you hesitated, standing over a frightened child, I did not?” His face as he looked up at the tree was edged in the soft, grey light, closed in with regret in a way that Luke knew intimately, from the inside.

There was already a hint of the day to come here, glimmering through breaks in the clouds, catching on the scatterings of rain that heralded the storm. It would be a dark dawning, but a dawning nevertheless. Tentatively, he reached out and touched just the edge of his father’s presence in the force.

Anakin flinched. He was afraid, confused. Unsure of how to have this interaction, just like Luke. And he was angry, a hot bright anger like the desert sunshine, and for a dizzying second Luke could see him as he had always been, as indignant child and vengeful adult and terrified, lonely youth, and he knew his father saw him just as clearly.

There was a streak of dark amusement, and the ghost of his father raised a hand. Now the sky boiled, the clouds streaking inwards. Luke’s heart lifted unbidden. The intent flowed through Anakin Skywalker like lightning, burning outwards into the clouds, and despite the sudden downpour he was warm. A bolt struck the tree. Flame blossomed. “I trust your feelings, even if you do not.”

The books must still have been in the tree. Luke stared up at the inferno, blazing in hot defiance of the rain, and tried for the first time in many years to summon trust against doubt. Habit, however, was a powerful thing – but he need not be alone with it. “The texts had thousands of years of accumulated wisdom,” he said, slowly. They had been tedious at best.

“So I heard. Over and over.” Anakin turned and returned to the rock he had been sitting on at first. Luke followed. They sat in silence for a few moments, looking back up at the pyre of the Jedi symbol, and Luke realised that he was crying. The rain swallowed the tears.

Anakin’s voice was perfectly audible, quiet despite the howling wind and the thunder. “Rey needs nothing of what’s here, and neither do you. You taught me yourself that love is where the light is. Not in books, or mastery.”

Across the sea, beyond the reach of the storm, the sun rose. And there was light.


End file.
